We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.
RALPH ELLISONPower doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
More Ralph Ellison Quotes
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the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile, and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.
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Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.
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I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
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Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
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It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.
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We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.
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Injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself.
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The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.
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I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.
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Man’s hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.
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I’m not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That’s how you make the new — by putting something else with what you’ve got. And I’m unashamedly an American integrationist.
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Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.
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God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
RALPH ELLISON